Aspern-Essling, 1809: Napoleon’s First Defeat in Person (NAP0051)

Aspern-Essling: the battle Napoleon lost to a river

Dorsenne sits his horse with his arms folded, and behind him the Guard runs off to the horizon in an unbroken line of bearskins and bayonets. Everything else in the picture is the cost: a dead horse still in its harness, grenadiers face-down in the grass, a helmet lying where its owner fell. Top right, a musket is spinning through the air. On 22 May 1809 the Emperor was beaten in a pitched battle for the first time in his life, and this is what it looked like from inside the line that covered the retreat.

The Austrians did not defeat the army — they cut the bridge

Napoleon had crossed the Danube on pontoon bridges to attack Archduke Charles. The Austrians sent barges, floating mills and whole trees down the current, deliberately and repeatedly, and the bridges broke. Every time they broke, the French army was split in half: reinforcements and — worse — ammunition could not cross. An army that cannot be resupplied cannot fight, whatever it does on the field.

It was an engineering defeat, and those are the hardest to accept

There is no brilliant enemy manoeuvre to point at. The Austrians fought well and held their villages, but what beat the French was moving water and floating timber. Defeats with unglamorous causes are the ones armies learn least from, because there is no tactical lesson to extract — only the reminder that a battle is fought at the end of a supply line.

What the Guard was doing there

Standing still. With the army cut in two and the attack failed, someone had to hold the ground while everyone else withdrew to the island of Lobau. The Guard’s job that day was not to win but to make the withdrawal possible, which is why the foreground is full of men who were killed doing nothing at all except remaining where they were. The man on the horse is the subject of NAP0243.

Lannes

The heaviest single loss was Marshal Jean Lannes, hit in the legs by a roundshot and dead nine days later. He was the only marshal Napoleon addressed with the familiar tu, and one of the very few who argued with him. The Emperor is reported to have wept — and the army noticed, because it had not seen that before.

Six weeks later, the same river, the other result

Napoleon did not abandon the crossing: he rebuilt it properly, with stronger bridges and a fortified bridgehead on Lobau, and went over again in July. That second attempt is Wagram — NAP0234. The interesting thing is not that he lost here, but that the response was engineering rather than tactics: he had understood exactly what had beaten him.